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How to format any drive in Windows 8.1 with ReFS

Windows 8 (or rather Windows Server 2012) introduced a new file system called ReFS. ReFS stands for Resilient File System. Codenamed "Protogon", it improves on NTFS in some respects, while also removing a number of features. You may read about the advantages of ReFS in the following Wikipedia article. ReFS is intended for file servers only. In Windows 8.1, it is in fact locked for server OS only. If you need to unlock and enable full read and write support for ReFS in Windows 8.1, you can follow these simple instructions in this article.

Note: 6 is my disk number which I want to format with ReFS. You should specify the correct disk number depending on what you see after doing 'list disk'. Also note, this operation will remove everything from that drive.

If you have any questions, see the following video:

Thanks to our friends "moderate" and "khagaroth" @MDL for this tip...

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About Sergey Tkachenko

Sergey Tkachenko is a software developer from Russia who started Winaero back in 2011. On this blog, Sergey is writing about everything connected to Microsoft, Windows and popular software. Follow him on Facebook, Twitter or Google+.

I use win 8.1 and i have added reg key. I managed to create a ReFS without mirroring on 2 steps with Disk management : -> new simple volume -> assign drive letter -> do not format ->finish. + format (select ReFS). However, it is not possible to do the same in storage space.

I found a problem with Event Log Viewer and Action Center fails to work correctly MiniNT key is present. Therefore, should make this registry only when you want to format. Fortunately, this registry is not needed for access to non-mirror ReFS volume.

My setup… I have a storage pool with 8 drives called “Storage pool”, I wanted to create a thinly provisioned 50TB parity VirtualDisk called “Parity81” and put on it a ReFS partition with the drive letter “R:”… so for the love of god if you already have a “R” drive, don’t run this script unmodified because it will format it!

(remove registry key again – careful, it will remove all keys in the MiniNT folder if there were others already there) Remove-Item -Path HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MiniNT

(I also set this because allegedly it makes things go faster but you can corrupt data if you’re not on a UPS and the power goes out) Set-StoragePool -FriendlyName “Storage pool” -IsPowerProtected $true